New UMBC-led research in Frontiers in Microbiology suggests that viruses are using information from their environment to “decide” when to sit tight inside their hosts and when to multiply and burst out, killing the host cell. The work has implications for antiviral drug development. A virus’s ability to sense its environment, including elements produced by its host, adds “another layer of complexity ...

Mosquitoes that spread Zika, dengue and yellow fever are guided toward their victims by a scent from human skin. The exact composition of that scent has not been identified until now. A UC Riverside-led team discovered that the combination of carbon dioxide plus two chemicals, 2-ketoglutaric and lactic acids, elicits a scent that causes a mosquito to locate and land ...

The rate that emerging wildlife diseases infect humans has steadily increased over the last three decades. Viruses, such as the global coronavirus pandemic and recent monkeypox outbreak, have heightened the urgent need for disease ecology tools to forecast when and where disease outbreaks are likely. A University of South Florida assistant professor helped develop a methodology that will do just ...

The worldwide Zika threat first emerged in 2015, infecting millions as it swept across the Americas. It struck great fear in pregnant women, as babies born with severe brain birth defects quickly overburdened hospitals and public health care systems. In response, there has been a flurry of heroic scientific efforts to stop Zika. Whole governments, academic labs and pharmaceutical companies ...

A chance discovery has opened up a new method of finding unknown viruses. In research published in the journal Virus Evolution, scientists from Oxford University’s Department of Zoology have revealed that Next-Generation Sequencing and its associated online DNA databases could be used in the field of viral discovery. They have developed algorithms that detect DNA from viruses that happen to ...